Monica Medina

What worries me the most is actually the disinformation that comes out of the Trump administration.

The fact that they say that climate change is a hoax.

The fact that they actually, some people on the right, for example, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, say things like the government was putting the disastrous weather into the places where they thought, you know, their political enemies were.

that there was some kind of weather modification happening out there to put people in harm's way by Democrats.

That's insane.

That's just not true.

And that's what worries me the most because it erodes the public's confidence in those very forecasts that have never been politicized before, that have always just been based on the science

and our data, and the fact that this disinformation is happening and causing an erosion of trust in these very basic services that the government has always provided, as you said, since its founding, NOAA was one of the

original parts of NOAA were the Weather Forecasting Bureau that went back all the way to Thomas Jefferson and to Ben Franklin.

And so the idea that now people are putting out disinformation about our ability to modify the weather in order to make people afraid and to discount or

and ignore the good warnings that they get.

I mean, you look at the videos from people in Texas who actually thought that the weather forecasts couldn't be trusted because the Biden administration had been in charge of them before.

It's just crazy.

And that's a shame because that is the essential function of government, which is to keep people safe

from harm that they can't really deal with as individuals.

That's the essence of government.

And they're undermining every bit of what used to be sort of apolitical and there just to protect people.

And I, you know, whether it's our military or our civil defenses, we see this erosion and confidence in science, in government, that to me is tragic and will take a long time to rebuild.

Ben, thank you so much.

Keep it up.

Thank you so much, Ben, for having me and thanks for everything you do every day to bring all of this to light.

What the Trump administration is doing is absolutely gutting.

One of the nation's best little engines of progress and one of the government's most effective tools at keeping our country and Americans every day safe and efficient and effective and able to do their jobs.

and keeping them out of harm's way.

And in that moment of sort of budget cutting, Project 2025, absurd cuts to parts of the government that are not expensive and that provide services to people, everyday people,

24-7 every day, year in and year out, make your life better.

It's just, it's tragic.

A government agency like NOAA is about 10,000 people.

They're spread around the country.

They're not bureaucrats sitting in some tower in Washington, you know, shuffling papers.

There are people in communities all over the country that are bringing accurate weather forecasts so that

transportation can happen so that we can have farm products that we need to keep our food on our table so that we have insurance that we can afford because we are predicting and preparing ourselves for the climate that we see is changing.

So NOAA is a wonderful agency full of people who are dedicated to making Americans safer.

It's part of our

Homeland Security defenses, and they are just recklessly and chaotically cutting the agency.

And it's just tragic because we will have a hard time putting it all back together again.

What is happening today is that the cuts to our weather forecasting not only hurt us in communities and in local areas and states and across our nation, but it also hurts us globally because we are part of a bigger weather enterprise.

The weather systems that we experience are not localized at all.

In fact, they're part of

Earth system and without observations from all over the world, we can't make the best forecasts for us and we can't help others who need those forecasts.

And so we will be more and more dependent on, say, the European satellites and their forecasts, but we aren't paying for them and we're not cooperating and we're not providing them data.

So we're kind of letting down the rest of the world and we're creating the conditions where

Say our transportation systems, our airplanes, our ships need accurate forecasts.

Our military defenses need accurate forecasts around the world.

We'll be less and less capable of doing that the more we degrade our own weather service.

And you know who's going to catch up to us?

China.

We have always had a better weather forecasting capability than the Chinese.

But the minute we start to degrade ours, they're going to continue to invest just like they have in

Things like chips and in solar panels and batteries and everything else in the technology realm where they're trying to catch us or passing us.

This is going to be just another place where we lose our edge.

And we are an incredibly...

We are incredibly dependent on our weather forecasts because our country is so big and our weather is so dynamic.

We really need these forecasts to be the best they can be in order for our economy to hum, for us to have the kind of efficiency and effectiveness that we've gotten used to.

You know, we used to not be able to

anticipate when a big storm would come and we'd have all kinds of flight cancellations and people would be stranded in all kinds of places and now we can see those things coming and we can plan for them the same thing happens you know if there's a storm and our ports need to shut down we can plan for that there are really important business needs that these weather forecasts rely on and we've been a good partner globally in the world meteorological organization

And we partnered with lots of other countries.

And now we're going to be letting them down and degrading our own forecasts at the same time.

So let me talk to you about two things that I think tell the story.

First is during the first Trump administration, some of you probably remember that time when the President Trump took out a Sharpie and changed the hurricane forecast

And I mean, he did something that had never been done before.

He politicized the weather.

He was doing it for his own political purposes.

And that put our whole weather enterprise kind of on its back foot.

A poor young meteorologist in charge in Alabama actually started getting calls and corrected that forecast that the president had proposed.

improperly changed.

And he was then the subject of retribution in the agency.

And the person who was the lead in the agency at the time is a very person that the Trump administration has nominated and who looks like he will be confirmed any minute now.

So the risk is that they will politicize the weather.

On top of that,

They are devastating the agency with personnel cuts, and those have already happened.

They've already cut hundreds of people.

The Weather Service was a kind of shorthanded, very, you know, really well-managed, efficient and effective, and oftentimes understaffed, even in good days when we had plenty of budget.

It's hard to find people to fill these jobs everywhere around the country where we needed them.

But then they...

willy-nilly cut people, and they cut away some of the key people in these agencies.

So meteorologists in charge are the people who kind of run the forecast offices in regions of the country.

And I don't mean big regions.

I mean sometimes within a state.

So take the state of Texas.

The meteorologists in charge of the area where the devastating storm hit this summer and where so many people were tragically killed

by the storm.

The meteorologist in charge position was empty.

And what does that mean?

Well, yes, the forecast was issued because the people who were there still

trying to hold the thing, the whole operation together, even though they were shorthanded, were able to issue the forecast.

But what doesn't happen is the person who knows how to get in touch with the camp administrator at those camps isn't able to make the calls because that person's gone.

And so we lose the connective tissue that is a key part of our

social fabric, our safety net, the way that we respond to these disasters as a community.

And those people, like I said, are not bureaucrats sitting in Washington behind some desk pushing paper, unlike the FEMA administrator at the time who was too busy to show up to work over that weekend.

These are people who show up every day and they don't make their forecast based on how they voted in the last election.

They do it in order to keep people safe.

But when we have huge holes,

in the actual staffing of these agencies, things fall through the cracks.

And that's just a good example of a place where, yes, the storm forecast was out and it was on time, but we lost some of the people who are crucial to keeping everyone safe when a storm happens in the middle of the night, which happens a lot.

So it is crucial that we

fully staff these positions.

And the Trump administration then scrambled to try and replace people in them, but it's hard to do.

And a lot of people didn't want to go back and risk being furloughed or fired again.

And so we really are much less safe and protected against these disasters.

And I wouldn't call them natural because they're climate driven.

They're driven by the pollution that we put in the atmosphere every day by burning fossil fuels.

These climate disasters are getting more and more intense.

They're putting more people in harm's way.

And so at just the very time when we should be increasing our investment and doing more to understand these bigger forces in the weather that are around us, we are cutting back and putting ourselves in a much more vulnerable position.

having to depend on data from other countries, and really leaving a lot of citizens at risk.

And it's reckless.

It's just not necessary, because these agencies cost pennies a day for every American.

They're a cup of coffee a year to have these weather forecasts.

I can't imagine there's a single American who wouldn't pay $5 to have those kind of weather forecasts.

And the private weather services

all depend on the government's forecast in order to make their beautiful, you know, forecasts that you get on your phone every day.

You wouldn't have those if it weren't for the people in those jobs 24-7 churning out forecasts and who are willing to make the most difficult forecasts, which are the ones about those extreme weather events.

Private weather services won't be able to do that without the National Weather Service fully staffed and fully functioning.